At 16 my daughter came home with her septum pierced. I made a bunch of jokes about getting a drop-shaped nose ring. She said, annoyed, "most parents will freak out and get mad when their kid gets a nose ring, not make jokes about it!" She seemed disappointed., I explained that i came from the generation that broke all the rules, you'd have to go pretty far to shock me.

A few years later, my son got the same piercing.

When people asked me about how i felt about my kids getting nose rings i said "i do it to all my kids"

In any case, my daughter, who at 33 still has her ring in, got a great tenured teaching job in a university, it wasn't a problem. My son got sick of his and took it out. Nicely, the septum is pretty much invisible so there is no unsightly hole. Better than a tattoo that would have appealed to a 16 year old and having to live with it at 30.

Anymore tattoos and piercings are so rebellious in a conformist kind of way. I had a friend of mine that had a 18 year old daughter that wanted this really stupid tattoo, instead of freaking out she told her daughter "That is the coolest tattoo ever!!! lets go together and get the same one, I can show all your friends that we have matching tattoos" Needless to say the tattoo idea quickly died.

Anymore tattoos and piercings are so rebellious in a conformist kind of way. I had a friend of mine that had a 18 year old daughter that wanted this really stupid tattoo, instead of freaking out she told her daughter "That is the coolest tattoo ever!!! lets go together and get the same one, I can show all your friends that we have matching tattoos" Needless to say the tattoo idea quickly died.

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brilliant!

But what if she bit - then the mother would have had to go through with it